


Casual

by Missiedith



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Drabble Sequence, Friends With Benefits, Friendship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-29
Updated: 2010-05-29
Packaged: 2017-10-09 18:50:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 30
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/90432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missiedith/pseuds/Missiedith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a casual relationship, perhaps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A drabble marathon I embarked upon during my massively insomniac phase. The plan was to write exactly 100 words an hour for as long as I could stay awake. What happened was I wrote exactly 100 words an hour for 30 hours, then went out for fish and chips and walked into a lamppost.

Marton laughed as he studied Viggo, all imperceptible lines and placid surfaces.  
   
"You can't be serious."  
   
It was evident, just how serious he was. Serious as fuck, and that was appropriate, seeing as a fuck was what was at the core of the question.  
   
Just a fuck. Colliding flesh and sweat-worn sheets. Men with their harsh fineness and demanding sensuality.  
   
Marton laughed as he studied Viggo, but he couldn't laugh off the question outright. He knew the answer to this one, exactly how friends weren't there for fucking.    
   
That night, as he looked at Viggo, the why became inconveniently elusive.


	2. Chapter 2

"This friendship's important to me, Viggo."  
   
"Me too."  
   
Marton tried to work out if Viggo was disappointed with him, if the rejection had stung a little. He'd had a moment of doubt, of insecure terror introducing the possibility that Viggo was after something less than the enduring amity that he himself was quite comfortable with. The idea crossed his mind as some careless smudge of charcoal, resented and shameful.  
   
The proposition had been unexpected, typically Viggo. It had been artistically unsubtle, and now Marton felt the need to pick at its layers.  
   
"I really don't think it's a good idea."


	3. Chapter 3

It didn't matter. Marton kept telling himself that it didn't matter, repeatedly, until he was sick of the thought, incessantly wittering in his head. Viggo hadn't changed, and Marton hadn't changed, and if Marton had been able to kick out that voice prompting him to forget an easy conversation held in a specific bar, then the friendship wouldn't have changed either.

 

As it was, Marton felt the discomfort that had been so lacking at the time. It should have felt like a strange conversation back when they spoke it, but the reaction slipped by, even as time now chased it.


	4. Chapter 4

Apparently, some already considered them some bizarre variation on a couple even back then. This altogether mystified Marton for longer than he kept track of, but even though it never amused him the same way it did Viggo, it didn't particularly bother him. Peripheral mocking, easily ignored.

 

They carried on the same as ever, and although Marton mentally still took out the conversation to try to dissect it but a little more, it was like trying to read the bottom layer of a paint-splattered collage.

 

Viggo first kissed Marton on a night of warm beer, jokingly affectionate, soft-lipped and familiar.


	5. Chapter 5

They began the casual touching without thinking. It didn't mean anything; lacked tension, guile or anything physically subversive of rational decisions. Maybe not quite innocent, though.  
   
Their closeness was impressionist, a blurred palette of contact and absent-minded caress. The lines blurred and receded, leaving an amalgamation of friendly exchanges, flavoured but not shaped by an echoing development of tangible presence.  
   
If Marton had stopped to think, it might have occurred to him that it was slightly unusual for two such people to be so tactile. But it was unlooked for soothing at the time, and relaxed into mindlessly once begun.


	6. Chapter 6

The parameters of whatever it is they had were blurred, but Marton remembers how things felt.  
   
He can remember the exact detail that struck him again and again. Square inches of skin pixelated along a continuous spectrum of imperfected flesh tones. He remembers noticing, not staring, maybe at the same time as he flicked Viggo's scrambled hair away from his face or as they sat talking.  
   
Each leaning subconsciously towards the other. Subconscious, not bothered with the why, but both stubbornly aware.  
   
Marton remembers sitting at friendly tables with secretly nudging thighs. Warm arms loosely draped, undemanding and unsuddenly familiar.


	7. Chapter 7

Kisses were fleeting. They attracted curious eyes, and so were generally but brushes of lip against skin, transitive and indefinite. Sometimes they were small, solid things, firmly planted, shut lips against shut lips, pleased hellos or equally happy goodbyes.  
   
Curious eyes that politely refrained from commenting. Or curious eyes that were too busy playing their own younger flirtatious games to articulate their inevitable misconceptions.  
   
Sleepy alone kisses never came often. But sometimes, just rarely, it would seem perfectly normal to share long wet exchanges with no direction, safely depositing both back at their blithe point of embarkation. Gentle, risk-free mouthing.


	8. Chapter 8

Marton was the one that took the next step, that disrupted the carefree equilibrium.  
   
They walked back one night, meandering in the summer air and talking gently. They reached Viggo's house, and on the doorstep Marton kissed him, completely and unsloppily, and rewriting the rules. Teeth and tongue and lips, pushing, entering, licking and sliding. It was everything that had never come before, and an admission of all that had been exactingly partitioned off.  
   
There still wasn't much of a why, just an undeniable. Everything that could have been forgotten, left standing as some dusty addendum of the friendship, declared.


	9. Chapter 9

Suburbia was exactly where Marton would expect to find Viggo. He knew this seemed oxymoronic to the rest of the world, understood the view that Viggo was pedantically eccentric, and would therefore belong anywhere but in the complacent normalcy of something so mundane as suburbia.  
   
Viggo belonged in the wilds, with bare feet in the grass and camping out. Or Viggo belonged in the city, with his camera and dereliction, and the powerful visual capture of society's grit.  
   
Viggo belonged in suburbia, like secrets, special innately, unassuming and needless of display.  
   
Viggo belonged in Marton's mouth, tongues twining in segue.


	10. Chapter 10

As Viggo drew him closer Marton felt hands encompass his waist, moving up along his sides with steady permission. He leant them easily against the door and gently rested his hands on hips clothed with familiar material, grip supportive and supporting.  
   
It was a connection, and the same connection that had been there all the while. Like reading a favourite novel in an entire new language, this kink of mouth was some delicious new perversion, multi-facetted but right.  
   
Marton's oral venture over Viggo's collarbone was something new entirely, an explorative probe, asking and finding, hearing the grinding.  
   
"Let's get inside."


	11. Chapter 11

The door closed behind them, and Marton thought, this is it, this is that melodramatic cliché. It was supposed to hit him then, he knew. He was supposed to look at Viggo and watch the walls and carpet melt like a candy house, with space-time distortion and two bodies suspended.

 

Odd, that emotion should be attributed such Einsteinian powers.

 

The world didn't melt, and Marton wanted to tell Viggo.

 

"Hey, did you notice that we didn't destroy the laws of physics, and isn't there something wrong with that?"

 

It didn't quite ring true, and Marton didn't know what to say.


	12. Chapter 12

Marton watched Viggo as he deposited his keys in the drawer by the door. Watched him turn, and wondered if it was at all possible that Viggo simply wouldn't see him standing there with his lost opacity.  
   
Viggo could have walked right through him, and he could have changed existentialism instead of physics.  
   
Viggo unbuttoned Marton's shirt, and as he watched the careful fingers at work, Marton was still detachedly wondering whether he really wanted this.  
   
Viggo kissed him, and he was still deciding. Viggo pulled him into a darkened room with Viggo-smelling bed linen, and Marton was still deciding.


	13. Chapter 13

For some reason it suddenly became ok. Because it was Viggo, maybe, or because it was Tuesday, and rainless. Because of clothes over chairs and familiar caresses newly possessing of want.  
   
Marton kissed and was kissed, moaned and attended, prompted and followed. Knew this body so well already, knew exactly where to press hard, where to stroke soft, which places wanted to give and had been telling him how for weeks.  
   
When he looked back on that night, Marton often wanted to think it was ok because it was Viggo. But mainly it was just ok because it was naked.


	14. Chapter 14

Their lightly haired middles rubbed, dry with heat but promising sweat transuded as Marton renewed his seize on the sculpted convex round of ass beneath his hands. Lips repeating a locking pattern, upper and lower lip alternated between with rhythmic tongue and taste and oh.  
   
There was no hesitation as Marton rolled them forward, Viggo onto his belly, stretching and spread and hard. Marton looming above, over, forwards, simultaneously collected and awed.  
   
Viggo reached for the bedside table, flicked on the light clumsily, and keen illumination changed nothing.  
   
Lube and preparation and condom. Then tight heat, and the closest embrace.


	15. Chapter 15

Marton had never seen Viggo naked before. The light streamed in through ineffective blinds, and the glow spread through the room, softly invading corners and hidden shadows.  
   
In curiosity he wanted to see it all. Wanted to move through every angle, and decipher what it was about this man's body that made him feel its movement as if by some cohesion.  
   
Marton wanted to see and know and feel all this. He didn't move, though, he kept still and let Viggo sleep. He pondered the light summer duvet tangled about his feet, and watched and waited as late morning rose.


	16. Chapter 16

When Viggo finally awoke they sat on the living room floor and ate bowls of cereal. Also, there was orange juice, but neither bothered with coffee.  
   
Conversation was not stilted. Viggo had the day off. Marton was still waiting for his next piece of work to come along.  
   
He should have spent the day reading scripts. He should have spent the day trying to work out how a certain character would have said this, or the subtle nuances of deciding the part's response to that.  
   
They sat and talked easily and inconsequentially enough, but Marton wished for a script nevertheless.


	17. Chapter 17

They didn't always stay at Viggo's, but it was often easier to do so than to stay at Marton's. Viggo would often have to go to work in the mornings, whereas Marton's obligations were more sporadic.  
   
Every time Marton came home to an empty house it felt wrong. An empty bed, unslept in, uncrumpled. Neglected. Marton knew, even back then, right from the beginning, that it wasn't quite right. A lack of definition.  
   
His house never accused, but it was always so obvious in its pain once ignored. Marton dismissed whatever needless parallels he knew he had created for himself.


	18. Chapter 18

Their friends didn't notice a difference, mainly because there was no observable difference. It was strange, a thought, that they spent so long seeing what wasn't there. Then, a whisper, a hint that they joked on, that they interpreted uncaring as they willed, and yet never approached the essence of. They became something else after the very first night in Viggo's bed, not a thought or a whisper, but something that had been there throughout, edifying but unremarkable, uninteresting.  
   
Nobody smiled their crude insinuations once the laughter ran old, and there was nothing new with which to pronounce discovered intimacy.


	19. Chapter 19

Every time Viggo kissed Marton, he remembered not to worry. Every time.  
   
Marton worried most of the time, in a perfectly healthy way, and simply as a means for regulating his life.  
   
But every time Viggo was there, the world made that little bit of extra effort to sort itself out. It was still there, never melted away as Marton continued to hope it might, but slowly he became accustomed to his Viggo-reinforced world.  
   
Life could fall apart without him, but then life could fall apart without any number of individuals. Marton never worked out what his contribution was, exactly.


	20. Chapter 20

Marton slammed the door, and dimly registered how Anduril clattered to the floor in the corner, reverberating from the force of the blow.  
   
He glared at Viggo, who looked exhausted, sandwich half-eaten and tea that Marton suspected would, in all likelihood, be stone cold, thermodynamically dead. He stood there before him and screamed his fury with accusing body posture and impotent mustered will.  
   
Could have burned, could have vented, could have powered a steam-based nation at the height of some industrial revolution.  
   
Eyes softened. Either way, either eyes, maybe both.  
   
"I don't understand why I'm not in love with you."


	21. Chapter 21

All Marton could do was listen carefully to the unhappy scrape of chair leg against floor. The sound grated as it perforated the stillness, and Marton couldn't bear to listen to anything else.  
   
Viggo stood with cruel placid calm, compassion, and understanding written clear. He stood in front of Marton all fearless and brave, the archetypal hero, and Marton thought he might hate him at that moment.  
   
Viggo broke as Marton watched, and his face rippled and fell apart, bell-broken in laughter. The sound scythed deep curves out of the room, and Marton couldn't bear to listen to anything else.


	22. Chapter 22

There was a certain relief to be found in chaos. Marton found it as he caught Viggo and the confusion rushed cyclonically through his mind, hissing in its sudden dispersion.  
   
Marton hadn't known what to expect when he said those words. In fact, he hadn't a clue he was going to say them until he actually did. Every bit of terror, unjustified, and he understood at that moment that he wasn't supposed to have known. Guilty insecurity to be forever forgotten.  
   
Who could have predicted this? A Viggo in hysterics, mirth stealing his breath and bending him over crippled, wheezing.


	23. Chapter 23

He sat Viggo down, and he carried on laughing. Incapacitated.  
   
He thought maybe if Viggo explained the joke he could laugh too and they'd laugh, and it would be together and laughed out. But Viggo couldn't breathe steadily for long enough to help with the requisite enlightenment.  
   
Marton got Viggo a glass of water, and sat it patiently on the table for him. Viggo ignored it, and Marton thought that maybe he should start getting worried.  
   
He tried introducing an orange drinking straw, but again Viggo ignored it. Marton gave up and poured the water over Viggo's mop of hair.


	24. Chapter 24

The water droplets clung, suspended to thin clumped tendrils of mouse dark hair. They caught on the daily grime that Viggo accumulated, and hung as miniscule baubles stuck with natural body oils and industrial hair products.  
   
The rest of the water lay in pools and splashes, wasted and lost, glistening even as it vanished into the air.  
   
Viggo had spluttered, then caught his breath, and gradually come down from his unhealthy high.  
   
He wiped the coalescence from off his face, a combination of tears and sparkling shock of splatter, and apologised as he flicked out the creases around his eyes.


	25. Chapter 25

Annoyance rang loud in his ears, but it wasn't directed at Viggo. Not entirely, and not relating to now specifically. Marton had sat on his anxiety for months, and Viggo had obviously been teetering at just past endurance for far too long, so Marton could wait.  
   
Absently he wondered what the hell Peter was doing to them.  
   
He ushered Viggo into the bedroom and closed the blinds as the other man undressed himself and crawled onto the covers. He went to turn the light out as he left, but Viggo pulled him down to him, and he let Viggo sleep.


	26. Chapter 26

They ate breakfast at four in the afternoon on Viggo's living room floor, sparse refrigerator emptied onto plates. Luxury fruit juice supped from unaesthetic mugs in a ritual so personal it almost felt routine.  
   
Marton sat leaning against the sofa, legs unfurled and relaxed. It would have been easy to leave the dramatics far behind, as an unamusing recollection. No, they weren't about to do that, but it was really Viggo's turn to open the evasive topic.  
   
"I'm not in love with you either, you know."  
   
"Well I rather figured you weren't after yesterday's debacle."  
   
Viggo grimaced. "Sorry about that."


	27. Chapter 27

Daytime light rested sheet-like over a mussed bed.  
   
They lay lazily in bed, trading affection and conversation.  
   
"So what are we then?" Marton planted a delicate leaf of lips just below Viggo's ear. "We're not lovers, are we?"  
   
"We could try it if you wanted, but I don't think it would work."  
   
"It wouldn't." Kiss, lick, squirm.  
   
"Don't get me wrong, I love you. It's just not like that."  
   
Marton didn't even have to think before he agreed. "So are we, what, just casual?"  
   
Viggo looked skeptical. "It doesn't feel very casual."  
   
"No," Marton agreed. "Not very casual at all."


	28. Chapter 28

Marton stood in front of the steamed bathroom mirror, squinting at a foggy reflection. Folding cloth over on itself, knotting and adjusting.  
   
"Sean asked me today if I was bringing you to the dinner."  
   
He looked up in surprise. "Viggo, you said they'd stopped snooping."  
   
"Apparently, never to be.  
   
The jacket was a dark blur in the mosaic the condensation played over the glass. A pale smear of face between collar and hair, features lost.  
   
"They know you're coming. Said we're not together, though."  
   
"We're not, apart from arriving and leaving."  
   
Marton wondered if his hair would ever look presentable.


	29. Chapter 29

There were new cast members that Marton hadn't met at that particular event. They chatted over sophisticated drinks and a reseau of gentle jazz as he stood by the bar, his right elbow leaning against the polished veneer wood, glass in hand. Exact.  
   
Something flickered, and there was a face, captured with a blink at the corner of his vision.  
   
The world never melted; Marton never remembered any bleaching colour or lost dimensions. The sound slurred, discordantly, and was gone. Leaving broken laws of physics and buzzing in his ears.  
   
He barely remembers Viggo's teasing smile and knowingly prompting words.


	30. Chapter 30

It took longer than he thought it would, if he's honest. Viggo and he, however innocent and reformed, were never going be even remotely convincing to a jealous mind.  
   
He knows some people who yet need to learn to mind their own business that enjoy blaming Viggo. They tell him that indulging in casual relationships is what ruins the worthwhile ones, and that at the very least Viggo should have stopped calling.  
   
If Marton thinks about love, to love, to be in love, and he thinks about what he's lost, then he smiles. Wouldn't change a second.  
   
Anything but casual.


End file.
